This joyfully venomous novella, whose title invokes the excellent Burt
Lancaster/Tony Curtis film Sweet
Smell of Success (1957), is ostensibly intended to satirize the
sorts of tabloid hack journalists who had enjoyed themselves so thoroughly
at the expense of Martin Amis, Will Self's literary godfather, several
years ago. But, perhaps just because I'm not British, there did not
seem to be anything presslike about the characters; instead it seemed just
a vicious, but worthwhile, savaging of the sort of amoral, ambisexual,
drug-addled, sensation-chasers who are all too common in every walk of
life and line of work these days.

Richard Hermes is an entirely minor features writer who has become caught
up in the vortex of young journalists who revolve around Bell, a constant
media presence known for bedding any man or woman he sets his eye on, sort
of Larry King crossed with a satyr. Richard recognizes the emptiness
of the lives the group leads, and still has a sufficient remnant of decency
to be repelled by the acts of needless cruelty that they thrive on, however,
he's fallen in lust with Ursula Bently, an icy blonde beauty, who hangs
with this crowd, but whom he compares to "a diamond found in a gutter behind
a Chinese takeaway."

Richard pays court to the intermittently receptive Ursula, and descends
deeper and deeper into a paranoid cocaine-induced haze, in which everyone
around him seems to resemble Bell. He harbors the improbable hope
that Ursula is redeemable and that the two of them can break out of Bell's
gravitational pull to live happily ever after. But in the end, even
as he plans to get away from the City and Bell, to return home for the
Christmas holiday, Richard finally gets his chance to bed down Ursula,
though the experience proves less than heavenly.

If the book is intended to say something specific about the press, it
escaped me entirely. No one actually seems to perform any kind of
work in the book, it's all clubbing, drugging, drinking, and scrumping.
But taken simply as a cautionary tale, a warning that by being with these
people you become one of them and sink into the abyss, it worked well enough.